Not the Beginning, Not the End

Have you ever understood something perfectly in theory and been completely terrified of it in real life?Catherine Rose has built her career on love stories, the kind that make you yearn for something you can't quite name, that settle under your skin long after the last page and leave you wondering if love like that actually exists outside of fiction. What she doesn't write about is her own life, the careful silence of it, the two years she spent choosing solitude over anything that might actually reach her, and believing every word of it.
Then came the publishing mistake that stripped away everything she'd hidden behind, her pen name, her carefully constructed public face, the distance she'd spent years perfecting. Suddenly she was exposed, standing in rooms she never agreed to enter, under lights she never asked for, answering questions she had no business answering honestly. What she hadn't prepared for was someone in the audience who wasn't interested in her answers, only in what she wasn't saying, watching her with the kind of quiet intensity that makes your breath catch and your carefully constructed walls feel suddenly, terrifyingly thin, the kind of gaze that reminds your body of everything your mind has spent two years trying to forget.
She has spent years writing about surrender, mapping its every contour on the page with the confidence of someone who understands it completely, never once accounting for what it would feel like to face it herself. A scorching contemporary romance novella with heat.